Felix Yanwei Wang
I am an EECS PhD student at MIT, working with Julie Shah on learning from human demonstrations.
Before MIT, I did my MS in robotics at Northwestern University and researched with Todd Murphey and Mitra Hartmann on active sensing. I completed my undergraduate degree in physics at Middlebury College with Richard Wolfson.
Outside research, I enjoy theatre and backpacking. I thru-hiked PCT in 2019.
Email
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Twitter
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Research
I'm interested in leveraging data-driven methods to make intelligent systems perform robustly in uncertain environments.
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Temporal Logic Imitation: Learning Plan-Satisficing Motion Policies from Demonstrations
Yanwei Wang,
Nadia Figueroa, Shen Li, Ankit Shah, Julie Shah
arxiv
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code
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project page
CoRL 2022 (Oral, acceptance rate: 6.5%)
We present a continuous motion imitation method that can provably satisfy any discrete plan specified by a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula. Consequently, the imitator is robust to both task- and motion-level disturbances and guaranteed to achieve task success.
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Visual Pre-training for Navigation: What Can We Learn from Noise?
Yanwei Wang,
Ching-Yun Ko,
Pulkit Agrawal
arxiv
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code
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project page
IROS 2023
NeurIPS 2022 Workshop (Synthetic Data for Empowering ML Research / Self-Supervised Learning)
By learning how to pan, tilt and zoom its camera to focus on random crops of a noise image, an embodied agent can pick up navigation skills in realistically simulated environments.
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MIT Museum Interactive Robot Exhibition: Teach a Robot Motions
Nadia Figueroa,
Yanwei Wang,
Julie Shah
We installed an interactive exhibition at MIT Museum that allows non-robot-experts to teach a robot an inspection task using demonstrations. The robustness and compliance of the learned motion policy enables visitors (including kids) to physically perturb the system safely 24/7 without losing a success gaurantee.
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Active Learning for Object Search
Yanwei Wang,
Todd Murphey
This research project studies the application of two information gain methods in a search problem: 1. Infotaxis - Search guided by entropy minimization 2. Ergodic exploration - Search guided by proportional coverage.
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Active Sensing with Tactile Sensors
Yanwei Wang,
Mitra Hartmann
This research project studies how active sensing, i.e., choosing what data to collect, can improve data efficiency for decision-making under uncertainty. Inspired by the active whisking behavior of rats, we use simulated rat whisker sensory signals as a model for spatial-temporal data to learn policies that first collect observations and then classify object shapes.
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Multi-agent Distributed Sensing and Control
Yanwei Wang,
Michael Rubinstein
This research project studies multi-agent distributed algorithms concerning coordination, segregation, and locomotion, with a hardware implementation of robust localization with cheap sensors on a low-cost underactuated system.
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Analyzing Energy Efficiency of Bio-Inspired Wind Generator
Yanwei Wang,
Richard Wolfson
pdf
For my undergraduate physics thesis at Middlebury College, I did a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of Festo's Dual-Wing generator using COMSOL CFD package.
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Projects
Miscellaneous class projects.
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